Choose to Influence with Integrity

It's easy to influence. It's much harder to influence with integrity. Whether you persuade for a living or you simply "sell" your ideas in the normal course of learning and living and working, you have already discovered influence techniques that work. Persuaders, in effect, are sellers. And vice versa. If you merely wish to improve the influence techniques that help you persuade others to your point of view, you can find numerous guidelines and primers and recommendations. The rule books for principled persuasion, though, are few and far between. And the books for powerful, principled persuasion are fewer still.
Part of the difficulty lies in the many possible definitions of key words, like "integrity." Is it, as the dictionary denotes, a question of honesty? Is it a matter of sincerity or of uprightness, as the dictionary also suggests? Would you perhaps equate integrity with sound moral principles? If so, what exactly are those principles?
Some people regard integrity as the decision to live according to the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Is this your belief as well? And what if you were seeking to measure your degree of integrity as well as define it? Would you assess your actions as ethical ones if they brought improvement to existing situations? If not, what gauge would you use? The choices for determining what integrity means are multiple and mingled--they overlap with many other factors.